Benchmarking through a Filesystem

Problem

Although using a filesystem is necessary for most storage deployments, it involves additional work in order to access the data stored on the ioDrive. These additional lookups decrease maximum system performance when compared to the benchmark results achieved by benchmarking directly on the block device.

Solution

When you are running micro-benchmarks to vet system performance, you should benchmark by accessing the block device directly. Otherwise, use any application-native filesystem implementation, possibly testing a handful where available. Fusion-IO testing has shown XFS to be reasonably fast under most circumstances. For Linux, Fusion-io recommends using the XFS filesystem.